I would like to throw this back in a positive direction. The task of
deleting poor quality photographs (and metadata/provenance/paperwork
is part of quality) is made much easier if we have good quality
photographs of the same topic. Nobody cares about deletions of bad
photographs when those photographs are no longer used. They do care
when it is the only photo of its kind, because it is a precious
resource.

An excellent point, John.

I wonder if there are organizations that (1) are concerned about gender issues on Wikipedia, and (2) have the ability to generate a substantial collection of high quality images to illustrate this sort of thing to the commons. If so, there might be a great partnership/project opportunity there.